As a growing number of organizations are adopting cloud-based solutions provided by different vendors, it is becomingly increasingly common for an enterprise's information technology (IT) landscape to be an environment composed of multiple cloud ecosystems. Each cloud-based solution carries its own technological stack, which exposes a solution-dependent user experience and a specific set of tools that help IT administrators control and manage the use of these cloud services.
By their nature, cloud-based systems are run in an isolated environment, requiring implementation of corresponding user management tools for each system. These tools are not typically shared between cloud-based systems. As a result, silos develop, thereby requiring users to maintain multiple identities for multiple cloud services. Since user identity management is proprietary to each of these systems, different sets of profile attributes and information are exposed while a user interacts with the systems' respective application program interfaces.
Users may wish to be able to efficiently switch between their identities. In particular, when a user is originally using one cloud-based system and wishes to temporarily switch to using another cloud-based system, the user may wish to access the tools of the temporary cloud-based system while remaining able to access the tools of the original cloud-based system. Further, it may be desirable to access information regarding a user from multiple cloud-based resources simultaneously. For example, when viewing a profile of a sales person, a user may wish to view both the sales person's latest sales activity (streamed from, e.g., Salesforce®) as well as the most recent document provided by the sales person (streamed from, e.g., Office 365). Since these cloud systems do not share a common user identity, it is difficult to match identities across cloud platforms.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a solution that would overcome the deficiencies of the prior art by identifying the user identities through a plurality of cloud-based systems.